Action expresses Priorities — Mahatma Gandhi
Actions shows the priorities for the organizations and sales team’s action in particular defines the success of the organization. Success is not achieved by one team in the organization, but sales team plays one of the most critical role in organization’s success. In the beginning of the year, sales leadership is working actively to define the targets for the next year or next quarter (which is never-ending cycle) and Sales Kick-offs are around the corner for some companies.
In 2018, only 9.3% of organizations followed a strategic sales-enablement based approach, but this group improved their win rates by 19.2%[1]. It clearly shows that companies should start following a strategic approach towards sales enablement.
As software development processes and tools have evolved over time, sales process and tools have also revolutionized. We have hundreds of tools for lead-generation, customer relationship management, sales tracking etc. But these tools help you to manage your sales but they do a little to fast track your sales process or increase your sales margins? Also, it might not help to reduce your overall sales cycle. We need to use right strategy and tools to enable our current sales teams.
Three Essential Pillars for Sales Enablement in an increasingly complex world:
1. Infrastructure on Demand for Sales Enablement
2. Automation — Deliver more with less efforts
3. Learning in Cloud Environment
Infrastructure on Demand for Sales Enablement
In past many decades, information technology has revolutionized every part of human life. Technology has helped us to move faster and we have adopted technology for good reasons. Software Development, Marketing and even Sales teams are leveraging technology to be more efficient and productive.
For Sales teams involved in deploying “evolving” next generation network technologies, it is important to leverage the technology today so that sales team can focus on better things rather than tracking the leads or remembering the conversation with partner last week. Whether you work for B2B or B2C market, sales teams must leverage the technology to their advantage. We have hundreds of companies for CRM, Marketing Automation, Sales Navigator etc. and sales teams should use these products effectively to be successful.
Virtualization can help Sales teams to fast-track their sales cycles and avoid dependencies on physical devices. It will be really great if you do not need any infrastructure for your sales team and they can perform sales demos from anywhere in the globe.
In today’s digital world, you need a sales enablement solution with lot of flexibility and control. Sales enablement primarily helps to align sales and marketing teams. It should be highly customizable and it should be scalable as per customer requirement.
Automation — Deliver more with less
Sales enablement in increasingly depending on automation of all various individual parts like Lead Generation, Opportunity tracking, PoC process etc.
There are hundreds of tools for marketing automation and they do a good job in helping us to be more efficient. But automation is still lacking in overall proof of concept phase when it is most critical to engage the end-customer and demonstrate the core capabilities of your product.
According to a news reported by CEB sometime back, 57% of the buyer’s journey is happening before the sales team has made initial contact. Most of these buyers are learning about your product through social media and they are already aware about your product and offerings even before you meet them. While buying process is changing, even selling process has to change in same manner and sales teams should be capable to adapt to it.
According to industry sources, 1 million of the worlds 4.5 million B2B sales jobs will disappear by 2020, supplanted by technology. [2] Most of these jobs will be order-taker category as technology can play a big role in that category to reduce human efforts. This data shows that automation is happening fast enough in the sales journey and we should leverage it.
Learning in Cloud Environment
As technology is evolving fast, sales teams need to learn latest technologies especially if you are selling a product or service in Information Technology world. We are in 5G era, and we have observed various transitions like MPLS to SD-WAN, traditional VPN to Secure Access, On-Premise to hybrid Cloud, Transformation of edge networks etc. It needs lot of energy in B2B sales teams to learn these ever-changing technologies at a fast pace. So one of the success mantra for sales teams is to always be ready for learning.
These learnings should be streamlined and there should be a method to certify your organization talent. Sales Leader should get an organizational view of the talent and their learning needs. Cloud environments enable us to learn anytime and anywhere. It should be top priority for a sales leader to invest in the learning needs of the team and help them to be more competent.
Criterion SDCloud® — Hosted Sales Enablement Solution
Criterion Networks provides SaaS based Platform for Sales Enablement to accelerate and simplify the sales process. Criterion SDCloud® delivers a broad set of capabilities for customer demos, Proof-of-Concepts and production pilots for SDWAN, Security, SDN and other custom network use-cases.
SDCloud® Hosted sales enablement solution offers learning labs, Sales Demos, PoC Library and Designer. It is well-equipped with end-to-end proof-of-concept lifecycle and it is customized to organization’s requirements to provide full flexibility and control. It also provides Talent certification capabilities through PoC Library and Sales Demos to fast-track your sales journey.
For free trial, please contact sales@www.criterionnetworks.com .
References:
[1] https://www.csoinsights.com/blog/sales-enablement-cso-insights-highlights-2018/
[2] https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/sales-jobs-vanishing#sm.0000qlyk851abcedbvo5ldtyig46z
